thoughts from Keezletwon

I am home alone this weekend getting a home improvement project done while Janelle and Kali are with Janelle’s mom in WVA at the Mountain House, preparing for “Curriculum Camp”, which is an academic planning retreat involving the faculty and other leadership from Janelle’s workplace. Since the tile mortar needs some hours to set up before I can proceed to the next step, I’ll take the evening to write a little about what’s on my mind concerning this point in our family’s history. This will be more of a reflection than a bulletin; that is to say, there is really no news to share with you per se.

We are all still (understandably) reeling from the loss of Nora. Yes, of course she lives on in all our memories and in the many lives she touched, and that’s a very real comfort. Still she’s not here to hold, and I miss her. I won’t go into detail about exactly what I miss about her. Like Kali, I miss all the things I used to do with Nora (except the feeding tube). I still can’t really believe that she, having been so present with us, is now gone from us. My grieving process right now involves lots of introversion, which is not surprising for those of you familiar with my personality on a daily basis. I’m not sure what to say about where I find solace, except that getting outside and ruminating on the master plan for our property seems to help distract me, and having meaningful work to do helps, provided I manage to actually get to the task as opposed to wandering aimlessly through the house. But what seems to help the most when I really miss her is just to remember what it was like to hold her or rub her head, how she loved gentle and close human contact, and to remember her interest in the world around her. Then some of the meaning that she contributed to my life is borne forward into the present, lodges in my chest and stays with me for a while. It is a comfort to know that I will always have this bank of memories to return to.

Sometimes I try to find comfort by saying to myself, “she would have led a very difficult life.” However, one of the adjustments I’ve started to make is the realization that it is probably fruitless to conjecture about what her life “would have been like.” This is something that separates our grieving from “normal” grieving. What I mean to say is that if someone is lost to accident or infection or some other acute illness, part of the grieving process is to think what would have been, had the loved one made it through. For Nora, there was no “making it through.” She died of natural causes, at seven months of age. I’m not sure I have a frame of reference for that truth. I think that once some time passes, that will begin to be an important part of our making peace with this whole experience. For now it’s sort of emotionally perplexing. What I do see more and more clearly, looking back, is that Nora had probably been working against her cardiopulmonary symptoms almost from day one, or perhaps even before day one. She knew no other way of existence, and was too innocent to feel the unfairness of it, so she simply picked up and began the work of development and settling in to her family with whatever energy she could spare for the tasks until it couldn’t be done anymore. Life was full of wonder and adventure for her, as it is for every baby. I have said repeatedly since her passing that she is my example of how I wish to live my life. I hope when my time comes to die that I am found to be still developing, and still learning my place in the universe with wide-eyed wonder.

I’ve been trying to watch Kali closely this week to see if I can begin to plumb her emotional depths, trying to ascertain whether she’s dealing with things in a healthy way (whatever that might be). Hour by hour it would be pretty hard to tell. She’s pursuing all her usual interests, and seems to have plenty of zest for life. Phew! However, when we look back at the way a whole day or few days play out with her, it is apparent that she’s experiencing some of the same fragility of emotions and perhaps some of the directionlessness that Janelle and I feel. Around the time of packing up and leaving for the Mountain House, Kali experienced a fairly significant meltdown, and Janelle, intuitive and compassionate mother that she is, crawled in bed with her and cuddled her while she sobbed. Transitions are a challenge for anyone, and Kali tends to get fragile around them anyway, but clearly in this case the specific situation was simply a trigger to expressing, and hopefully releasing, feelings that came from a deeper place. I wish I could understand her better, and I worry about her, but for now I am satisfied that she feels safe in her process, and that it is heartbreakingly healthy. It is right for things not to be right for her. She is perfectly justified in feeling confused, disoriented, sad, and frustrated, when she does feel those things. That’s how I feel sometimes too. But it’s hard to watch her go through it. I hope so much that she feels deeply o.k. and safe in our family, that we support her totally.

It seems we will be able to dedicate some concentrated time to family building. A cottage on Cape Charles has been generously offered to us for a few days, and we are counting on some quality time with inflatable toys in the bay. Following that we plan to travel to PA to spend some time with my parents, whose home we have been unable to visit for over a year. They have a pool, so Kali should get her fill of both salty and chloriney water on this vacation. We are all looking forward to the time away together, while keeping our fingers crossed regarding the transitions.

I am still thankfully not experiencing any regret or anger about the process of Nora’s death. Her death, like our grieving process, is one of those things that, while being extremely hard to accept, was, for her, almost definitely (can I even say it?) the right thing. Even though we had hoped for something so different, I still feel and know that this is one of those things that just happens and which becomes incorporated into our personal and family histories, and can even in the end make some very positive contributions to our individual and shared character. But that’s the long view, which, while helpful, does not exempt us from the now. Right now we all miss her in our own ways, and we’re each struggling to know how to relate to each other in this new family, the family where one member is a memory.